Meeting Roles

Proposals

Proposal: Mobile Calyx Node for The Village

Proposal to spend ~$900~1000 on a mobile Calyx node to be first deployed at the new Village site near Coliseum for one year. Will be returned once we establish line of sight to a neighbor open to sharing their bandwidth (or reach it via Paxio link to the hills) and thus reusable for future actions / temp locations.

Idea: get a box, put a thing in it with WiFi, 4G, a battery, and a solar panel.

4G via Calyx membership - 400/year + 100 initial equipment fee

scott - will they waive equipment fee if we're providing our own?

Put it up at the village. If it works well, then we start raising funds. Every time we get enough, we throw together another one and deploy it where there's high need.

Spread with mesh routers once one is up.

marc - during december, not that much sun - so running solar power might not work during this time - peak power usage is above 12 watts, average might be less than 8 watts. Would need 100 watt solar power to run it 24/7. Hard to mount on tall pole with 100 watt panel. Maybe have smaller panel lower. Issue is that it might get stolen.

Total cost would be around - 400

modem - 125

altogether - 1000 for up front equipment and first year

Jehan - Mesh ++ makes something like this, but for 3000 - maybe they would sponsor us with one of their units.

Ben - 4G?

Jehan - not sure.

Mai - we should work out the logistics before we pay the 400 and start the membership. Concerns with how to secure it

Jehan - we could put up decoys

Marc - how long before we can move forward?

Lesley - if it's not past the 2000 limit, then we don't have to do that

Jehan - we have consensus, don't we

null - can we use a streetlight?

juul - no that won't work.

Ben - pole mounted to fence?

Jehan - drill, put in pilings, 30 ft

Marc - if someone can find a way to mount it so it won't get stolen, let's just go ahead and do it. And even if it doesn't work, we'll have a 4g access point we can use for something else

jenny: harbor freight flagpole w/ guy wires? there are also several structures we could mount to

also, village folks lock the gate when not open (currently open mon/wed/fri 10-5) and have 24/7 security

ben: We talked about what we wanted and also what a minimum viable product would be for what we want to install and they're willing to just give us rackspace. We talked about bringing in a router and a switch for multiple radios on the roof. We have a 12-harddrive storage server. We just need to buy hard drives for it.

Mai: somebody was gonna follow up, who? (benny) the last thing Jonah asked us is what routing configuration we would use that is connected to our equipment on the tower

null: I think benny?

send e-mail about richmond tower working group meeting (mai) - done

marc - we agreed to meet this past Sunday. I set up the rackmount server with latest debian. Need to add babel and tunneldigger, set up cron backup, etc.

Node Mounts & Outreach

grant - Matt from Paxio got back to us, said there is no LOS between Omni Commons and downtown Oakland? Suggested looking for places in Emeryville or Golden Gate neighborhood.

Ben, Marc, Jehan - ... But we do have line of sight

Is it possible we have wrong building?

-Seth i'm gonna make a googleearth map tomorrow night.

I'm not sure how to respond to Matt's last email, Marc or Mai wanna pick up on this thread?

Also benny was looking at places for Internet Archive mount in West Berkeley, maybe one those that could also see Paxio?

Paxio's presumed location in 436 14th St, Oakland.

Jason's install - decide equipment - he will get sonic gigabit fiber soon. Lesley dropped off rocket + N600 with him and can see the signal from her place, but it only has a ~300 mbps throughput maximum.

Ben - power constraints at Jeff's place. Ideally would have omnidirectional. But for his proposed setup, we might need to store equipment at Jeff's/John's and run another wire.

i.e. if we're going to have a rocket at each site, we'll want a directional point-to-point link as well. This means we need a switch, etc.

bonus issue - we're under the radar at Jeff's place

Ben - rigth now we just have a nanobridge at Jeff's place, running sudowrt, so we would need to swap it out with one running airos. We should have either omni or sector attached to a rocket. If we're also going to put a rocket at Jeff's and a rocket at Jasons, we could just put rockets on both, or we could get a couple of Microtic wireless routers, but that would require plugging into both extender node ports on n600, which would be slow, or throwing in a switch. If we did microtics we'd need switches on both ends, which might be difficult due to landlord/power constraints at Jeff's place. I'd like to keep that simple on that side.

scott - Should I reach out to All Power labs about getting a tower on their place as an Internet Archive connection?

juul - thinking about playing around with pogo plugs, which I've got a bunch of. You can pull them apart without tools, have root access, and bootload them easily. They're $15 each. We can play with these, and use some hard drives, and play around with them at the event.

marc - not much has been happening with disaster radio but maybe Grant would be interested in showing off the simulator

ben - could be cool to set up a monitor up for the simulator's visualization